‘I don’t, I . . .’ Marjorie stammered, thunder struck.

‘No, you don’t realize, do you? Perhaps you haven’t cared to think about it too deeply. Your mother is a very demanding woman, a very selfish woman. I have spoken to her myself, though I know from experience that it is almost useless telling home truths to someone of her age and in her condition.’

So it was true, after all. Marjorie felt a spurt of real rage against Pauline. ‘I should have thought it was for my mother’s own doctor,’ she blustered. ‘I don’t know what an outsider . . .’

‘An outsider?’ She might have levelled at him some outrageous insult. ‘I am a close friend of your sister, Mrs Crossley, perhaps the only true friend she has. Please don’t speak of outsiders. Now if you have any feeling for your sister, I’m sure you’ll appreciate . . .’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ Marjorie almost shouted. Her head was splitting now. ‘It’s no business of yours and I don’t want to discuss it.’

She told George.

‘He said he was a close friend, her only true friend. They’re cooking this up together, George. He means to marry her, but he’ll get Mother out of the way first. He’ll foist Mother on to me and then they’ll get married and . . . Oh, George, what I am I going to do?’

Not see Mother or Pauline, at any rate. Marjorie extended her headache over the next two visiting times, and after that she half-invented, half-suffered, a virus infection. Of course, she had to phone and explain, and it was with a trembling hand that she dialled the number in case that awful man should answer. He didn’t. Pauline was more abrupt than ever. Marjorie didn’t mention her doctor friend, though she fancied, just as she was replacing the receiver, that she heard the murmur of his voice in the background talking to Mother.

It was George and Brian together who at last paid a visit to Mother’s house. Marjorie was in bed when they came back, cowering under the sheets and trying to make the mercury in her thermometer go above ninety-eight by burying it in her electric blanket.

They hadn’t, they said, seen Pauline’s friend, but Nanna had been full of him, now entirely won over to him as a charming man, while Pauline, as she talked, had sat looking very close with an occasional flash of impatience in her eyes.

‘He’s got some Russian name,’ said George, though he couldn’t remember what it was, and Brian kept talking nonsense about dogs and reactions and other things Marjorie couldn’t follow. ‘He lives in Kensington, got a big practice. One of those big houses on Campden Hill. You know where I mean. Pauline did a private nursing job in one of them years ago. Quite a coincidence.’

Marjorie didn’t want to hear about coincidences.

‘Is he going to marry her?’

‘I reckon,’ said Brian, ‘going from the way Nanna talks about what he says.’